Through the two recent blizzards, I’ve been riding light rail to work and enjoying “Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver,” by Diane Ott Whealy, my nose stuck deep into its ivory, photo-sprinkled pages.

"Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver," by Diane Ott Whealy

Seed-saving used to seem the high holy of garden geekdom, and even after a long how-to session at Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce, more trouble than I had time for. Then I tasted a tomato from a farmer’s market that I just had to have more of, and learned how easy it is to save tomato seeds because of how the plants pollinate. For many plants, though, it’s not easy to save seeds that you can be sure will produce another generation that’s like their parents.

But it is essential. If you’re reading this, you probably are hip to the world of flavor and variety in, say, an heirloom tomato. You might have even read one of Amy Goldman’s wonderful books on heirloom tomatoes, melons, or squash.

Heirloom vegetable seeds don’t just produce themselves. They have to be planted, kept pure, and then specially harvested and treated. The people who do this work are keeping history and tradition alive, preserving our food supply’s genetic diversity, and its beauty, and its flavor.

Today, if the varieties your grandparents and great-grandparents grew are available, you can get them in large part thanks to people like Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, who founded what was to grow into Seed Savers Exchange back in the 1970s, when her grandfather bequeathed some special morning glory and tomato seeds. (Kent, from Kansas, and Diane, from Iowa, actually met here in Colorado in Estes Park).

“Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver” tells the story of SSE’s genesis: 29 gardeners who sent 25 cents and a large envelope to the “True Seed Exchange” in northern Missouri. Those gardeners got a six-page publication listing seed other gardeners were willing to share. The year after that, the group was 142 people and the seed listing was rolled out on a mimeograph machine.

Soon after, Seed Savers Exchange established itself as a national non-profit. Since then, its membership has grown to more than 13,000; it has permanent grounds at Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, with an orchard of hundreds of heirloom apple trees and rare-breed cattle. The annual yearbook, full of thousands of people willing to share heirloom seed, lands with a big “thup” in a mailbox, complete with seed descriptions and contact information. Maine gardening guru Eliot Coleman speaks at the farm’s annual campout.

It wasn’t easy. Diane Ott Whealy’s memoir, which reads like a story she’d tell you if you sat next to her at a big Iowa family reunion, is frank about what it took to build an institution that both she and her then-husband believed in, to the point of going without health insurance for themselves. They had day jobs and often night jobs for many years while devoting every spare moment to Seed Savers. The bean seeds — numbering in the thousands, that a collector entrusted to them — lived in their basement.

Their five children got tired of hearing them talk about seed saving. In fact, the couple envisioned Heritage Farm — a permanent place to anchor their mission — on a country drive when the kids had challenged them them not to bring up seeds the entire time. They had given this dream 15 years of their lives and all of their energy when, in 1990, Kent Whealy was given a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. It meant that they could, for the first time in their married lives, buy a safe car.

This is how it all happened: piles of letters on a desk; oak cases of bean seeds in their basement; farmers and gardeners sharing knowledge, stories, recipes. One farmer responded to a radio interview with Kent and Diane and wrote in to say he had seeds for a melon they’d been searching for. The melon was Moon & Stars, a beautiful, yellow-fleshed melon with a golden blob and smaller golden speckles. It’s that melon variety that Judith Ann Griffith illustrates on the book’s jacket, surrounded by its foliage, bedecked with a speckled Eastern tiger salamander.

It’s a beautiful book that’s both stylish and homey; a story of planting a seed, believing in its rightness, and giving it all that you have.

I try to find beauty in all things and all aspects of life, but i sometimes tend to focus on what’s wrong with the picture instead of what’s right. I look too closely at the little imperfections and forget to stand back and take in the beauty of the big picture.

It is for this reason that I was afraid to go outside into my backyard after last week’s snowstorm. I knew that the leaves from my autumn blaze maple tree and quaking aspens would no longer be fluttering in the breeze, but would be crushed and scattered on the ground, in the garden and on the pond. A day’s work of cleanup staring me in the face.

I knew that the last remaining vegetables that were so close to being ripe only a few days ago would be inedible. Dead and gone, withered and rotting on the vine. Where only weeks earlier had been a lush, green oasis of life, growth and bounty, would now be an overwhelming picture of death and decay. And even though this day was deceivingly warm and sunny, if I walked into the garden I would surely know that the end of summer had come, there would be no denying it.

So, I challenged myself.

I would take my camera out to the garden and look closely at the details. But this time I would focus on the beauty. The beauty of changing seasons, regeneration and renewal.

What I found when I stepped outside was a garden alive with color and texture. A picture that I had never really appreciated and I was more than pleasantly surprised.

Like every other house on my block, my house has one tree smack in the center of the front yard (at least each tree is a different variety). Mine is a flowering crabapple, and she is the center of my land, my small domain. A bedecked, bee-dazzling beauty in spring. A shady screen from the sun in summer. In fall, a source of food and shelter for the winged and the bushy-tailed.

Oh, she was gorgeous this year. In bloom, she was deep, deep fuchsia-red. She was buxom and bountiful and generous and female to the core.

She was overgrown.

I knew it before the storm. I’d gotten the tree people called. They came out two weeks ago and assessed her and estimated the job at $285 (I winced). But they didn’t want to come and do the pruning until late November or December, when the tree would be truly dormant. The weekend before the freeze, I thought I might pru ne some pruning of the smaller branches, the ones I could reach, but I pulled tomato plants and cut broccoli raab and obsessed about roses instead. Because that’s how I thought of last weekend’s coming storm: a freeze. Then perhaps a really deep freeze. I scoffed at the predicted possible accumulation. “Snowpocalypse Nah,” I tweeted. I stayed down in Denver to avoid commuting during the coming storm. But I didn’t think of it as a tree killer. I worried, but mostly about my roses, and about whether the soil would go into permafreeze with my $75 worth of bulbs from High Country still on order, and whether my co-workers would help me use up the huge bag of broccoli raab.

I am home now, three days post-snow, to find that weather has pruned my tree for me.

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High up, a broken branch twisted by the snow's weight

I unload the car in the dark. Passing cars actually slow down to view the damage. I imagine they are paying some kind of respects. My neighbors have seen the blood and sweat I’ve lavished on my modest little plot, and have seen how slowly I’ve had to do it.

In a few hours it will be light. The damage may look better or it may look worse. The sprinkler people will come to do their belated blowout. My neighbor will come with a chain saw. Another friend who knows from trees might come. He might tell me that she will live, that she’ll be beautiful and abundant again. But right now at 5 a.m. on a dark Saturday morning, I think that only the poets can comfort me, and I paw through my shelves of books, each shelf a section of the lives I’ve lived, to find Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, who writes luminous poems about nature and its secrets, its wounds and its metaphors, in poems like “Blackwater Woods,” in American Primitive (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1976).

“…To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

Since there’s snow coming to Colorado’s mountains now, I’m especially grateful that I got up to Estes Park last Friday to see some things in the gorgeous, golden light of autumn, which always seems that much more intense the higher you go. What follows is a random list of eye-catching things, from the high country and from my desk.

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Cleome, or spider flower, in downtown Estes Park

1. Cleome – a.k.a. spider flower – this giant stand of it, with stalks as big around as my thumb and blossoms that came up to my chin, taking people’s eyes off the parking lot for a resort.

I don’t have the space for pumpkins and am not much of a pie eater, but my boss Ray Rinaldi grew this perfect sphere in his first veggie garden at his new house. And pumpkins are emblematic of October in so many ways. It’s hard for a new gardener to know when to pick ’em (when the sides can’t be scratched by a thumbnail and frosts have killed the vines, according to Director Larry Vickerman at the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, where they’ve got a bumper crop this year).

With pumpkins and many squashes, the plants are so huge and vigorous and jungle-icious – and then those ground-covering vines are so VERY gone, but dashed with brilliant orange, like a signal flare to tell the world how hard they toiled all summer to bring you that fruit. Pumpkins come in a host of varieties, from minis like “Baby Boo” to the half-ton giants growers haul to contests LINK with hoists and other rented hardware, from classic round Jack O’Lantern globes to squat, reddish, warty French Cinderella-ish Rouge vif d’Etampes. I love them all, and would grow a rainbow of them given the room, especially the blue-green Jarrahdale, actually a squash, though it’s pumpkin-shaped.

But a picked pumpkin patch is a sign that it’s time to get busy on other, less delicious, less scenic chores.

It swept in Wednesday and stayed around through early Thursday morning, left a lovely reminder of itself in a Friday fog, just enough to linger in the hollows, not enough to snarl my commute.

I came out Friday morning to find my mesclun well-muscled, my chard seedlings charged, my broccoli raab looking like it might someday make a me a meal instead of just thinnings to crunch while weeding.

And look, look: bright little marble sized tomatoes, fully ripened on the two patio plants I’d just about given up on, hankering to take over their pots for more lettuce. (If your produce is pumped on last week’s rain, whip out your digital camera and show it off here. You could win a great edible gardening book!)

Let’s not be thinking about the fact that the rain will nurture weed seeds as well as grass seeds, thistles as well as thyme. Let’s roll over and wallow in the fact that, while it’s falling, we shouldn’t really be out there weed-whacking or fertilizing or, duh, watering (and yes, on a walk last Wednesday night in my subdivision, I saw automatic sprinklers going full blast in the greenbelt). We should snuggle deeper into the blankets and plan and plot and ponder.

A late night at the grocery store: I’m picking up the kind of things one typically buys after the hardest day of the week: gelato, and silly candy, and maybe a few staples. And in conversation with my checker — one of the jobs a U-Scan-It computer cannot and will never duplicate — he tells me that he’s leaving in a week to go back to school to study ag and ag business under a USDA program to help beginning farmers.

He’s surely in his 50s. But he has that gleam that people have on the cusp of a new adventure. He has friends with land and cattle. He knows that when he goes into a barn at night, there won’t be any time clock hanging from the rafters. He’s going to spend his days outdoors, in connection with animals and the soil, and eating the best food he’s ever tasted. “Our beef is really good,” he confides, “but it can’t touch my friends’ beef.” His optimism is like a virus, and I walk out of the store, into the summer night, grinning.

I spent Saturday afternoon in what looked like a war zone. The post-battle scene was quiet now, even peaceful, I thought, as I looked down and spotted a bright orange ladybug. Walking slowly from one casualty to the next, I choked back tears. It was time now to recover the dead and lend aid to the bruised and battered.

I mean, these plants weren’t just picked up at the local garden center and plopped into the ground. (well, a few might have been) Most of these plants were grown from carefully picked out seeds, deposited gingerly, one-by-one into pencil-width holes, measured to the perfect depth into rich, organic soil and then placed under UV “grow” lights, connected to a timer to ensure proper balance of “day and night.” They were even repotted not once, but twice, when they outgrew their little biodegradable containers.

I suppose it was just a matter of time. These days, it seems, no one is immune to the devastation of natural disaster…. Earthquake ravages New Zealand; Tsunami takes down Japan; Tornadoes level Joplin and Tuscaloosa; Flooding consumes cities from Mississippi to Illinois; Heatwave grips the country, Fires engulf Arizona and Texas, you name it, we got it.

But their garden was pretty much fine, just fine, which tells me the hail was spotty and, though sometimes huge, not incredibly sustained. Then again, there were no squash, no melons, no cukes in their gardens. They have mainly xeric perennials, herbs, shrubs and snack veggies with smallish leaves — peas and the like — which tend to shrug off such storms. I haven’t yet had a chance to check on my own beets, beans and tomatoes in the backyard, or the beets, beans, tomatoes and peppers in a community plot I rent.